Document photo sizes, in one table
Photo sizes for Indian paperwork are not standardised across departments. Here are the ones that come up most often, with the pixel equivalents for online uploads.
The common sizes
| Size | mm | Inches | Px at 300 DPI | Typically used for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passport | 35 × 45 | 1.38 × 1.77 | 413 × 531 | Indian passport, most visas |
| PAN | 25 × 35 | 0.98 × 1.38 | 295 × 413 | Form 49A, many college forms |
| Square | 51 × 51 | 2 × 2 | 602 × 602 | OCI card, US visa, some missions abroad |
| Stamp | 20 × 25 | 0.79 × 0.98 | 236 × 295 | Small ID slips, ration and school records |
| Postcard | 102 × 152 | 4 × 6 | 1205 × 1795 | Prints, not documents |
Reading a requirement correctly
Two traps catch people out:
- Order of the numbers. "3.5 × 4.5 cm" and "4.5 × 3.5 cm" describe the same photo, but some forms write height first. A 35 × 45 photo is always taller than it is wide. If your crop is wider than tall, it is wrong whatever the numbers say.
- Outer size versus head size. A form may specify the photo dimensions and how much of the frame the head must fill. Getting the outer rectangle right is only half of it — a correctly sized photo with a tiny head in the middle still fails.
Pixels, DPI and file size
Print size and pixel size are different things. A 35 × 45 mm photo needs 413 × 531 pixels to print cleanly at 300 DPI, and twice that at 600 DPI. Online portals usually state pixels and a maximum file size instead of millimetres, because they are not printing anything.
If a portal demands a small file — 50 KB is common — the answer is to reduce JPEG quality, not to shrink the pixels below what was asked for. Dropping the dimensions to hit a file size is what produces those blurry, blocky photos you see stapled to forms.
Pick a size and start
Every size here is built in, plus any custom measurement you type.
Open the photo maker